On Wednesday at 9 a.m. the first musicians will be sitting on the stage of the Great Festival Hall and getting to know themselves and their instruments. The orchestra attendants have just brought double basses, cellos, harps, percussion, trombones and tuba to the backstage. On Tuesday at 7.30 a.m. Bernd Übermuth, El Hasan Jriri and Maximilian Euteneuer set off from Wuppertal in the symphony orchestra’s truck – they arrived in Salzburg at 11.30 p.m.

“This is the biggest backstage I have ever experienced,” says Hartmut Müller as he unpacks his tuba. In more than 40 years of orchestra experience, he has seen countless back stages. The entire set of an opera is still standing here, but there is still a lot of space. The Great Festival Hall, the largest venue of the famous Salzburg Festival, is both an opera house and a concert hall. To make space for the impressive building, 55,000 cubic meters of rock were blasted out of the Mönchsberg. The owner of the elongated building is the Republic of Austria. The 35 meter wide auditorium with the wooden charm of the 1960s has 2,179 seats and can hardly be compared with the local venue, the historic town hall. The Wuppertal town hall “only” offers space for 1,150 spectators. However, Wuppertal has 365,000 inhabitants, more than twice as many as Salzburg with 158,000. At the opening of the Great Festival Hall in July 1960, the opera “Der Rosenkavalier” by Richard Strauss was performed under the musical direction of Herbert von Karajan. There is at least one thing in common: at the opening ceremony of the town hall, the composer Richard Strauss personally conducted his symphony “A Hero’s Life” in Elberfeld.

The dress rehearsal almost sounds like a concert

Salzburg is also recognizable outside the festival season as the famous festival city, of which the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal said: “Salzburg is the heart of the heart of Europe. It lies in the middle between south and north, between mountains and plains, between Switzerland and the Slavic countries.

The stage is filling up, 81 musicians have taken their places. On Sunday and Monday they gave a concert in the Historische Stadthalle, on Tuesday morning they got on the train in Elberfeld and, after a ten-hour journey, arrived at the hotel in Salzburg at around 8 p.m. The rehearsal begins at 10 a.m. sharp with the symphonic poem “Don Juan” by Richard Strauss. It almost sounds like it’s already the concert. As a conductor, Patrick Hahn is still fine-tuning individual bars, wanting to play some more delicately and slowly, others more accentuated. Wuppertal’s general music director jumps off the stage to listen to the sound in the large, almost square concert hall, whose stalls lead very steeply uphill. With one leap he jumps back onto the stage, continues to hone his work and slightly reduces Don Juan’s all too great fortissimo thunder. The tuba, the instrument of the year, is also used in this work. Tuba player Hartmut Müller has been retired since June, but his position has not yet been filled. Tuba, harp, percussion and other instruments will not be used at the concerts on Thursday and Friday, so seven musicians are leaving on Thursday. After 90 minutes of intensive rehearsal work, there is a short break for conversion. The grand piano is placed in the middle of the stage, the pianist Lukas Sternath starts playing, and the equally intensive rehearsal for the 2nd Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in B major by Johannes Brahms begins.

The members of the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra will not see much of the baroque old town and the many tourist attractions of the “Mozart City” of Salzburg, because the first of the three concerts begins at 7 p.m.

You can watch the symphony orchestra on the road in a current tour blog: